The Cat who Wrote
by CosmicQueerness
Summary: A struggling writer inherits everything when her only close friend passes away. She has a new house, a new assistant, a good amount of money, and a strange new cat that the previous owner trained how to write. A cosmic horror short story set in the Cthulhu mythos.


I was deeply saddened when I heard that my friend, Lillian Wilmarth, had finally passed away on the 24th of April at the age of 43. It was not unexpected news. She had been in a grave condition for a while now as the cancer ate away at her. It got to the point where there was nothing the doctors could do but send her home to die. I was shocked however, to find that she had left me all that she owned.

Lillian was a well known writer born and raised in the town of Stonehaven Washington, and had at one point taught philosophy at Whitraine University. But that was before she was diagnosed. She worked to fight it, for a time, and even had a few years in remission, but even then she was never the same woman. She became furtive and reclusive, spending most of her time at home and with her assistant, a Ms. Zinnia Waite. Zinnia started out as a secretary but as time went on and Lillian's condition declined, she became more of a live-in nurse. It was Zinnia who came to my house that day to tell me of her passing. It's possible that I was the only person she kept in contact with during the end, aside from Zinnia who she seemed oddly close to, but it's possible that comes from the inherent intimacy of such personal care. I never saw anyone come visit her at home other than doctors and specialists, and she never spoke of anyone else.

I first met Lillian as I took her class at the University, an amateur writer myself and a fan of her work, her teaching position was what inevitably secured my decision to enroll at Whitraine. Impressed by my natural aptitude for writing, she ended up taking me as an underling, and we eventually became good friends and colleagues. I often found myself coming to visit her at her home as she began to sink away from the word, and it was hard to watch her waste away as time went on. When Zinnia showed up at my door that day she was holding two things, a letter from the deceased, and that strange cat. She told me that Lillian had passed quietly in her sleep the night before and gave me the letter. As I began to read it she sat herself in the living room with the cat sitting on her lap.

'Dear Sarah,

Soon I will be gone, and after much deliberation I can think of no one better than you to inherit what I have. Therefore in my will I have left my house and all my possessions to you. There are of course a couple stipulations. The first is that you take Zinnia into your employ as an assistant, as I would hate for her to be unemployed after my passing. I've been telling you for a while now that you could benefit from a secretary and you will be hard pressed to take care of the house yourself. I have arranged part of my funds to be set aside to pay for her services for the foreseeable future, so you have no reason to decline. The rest of my assets are yours to do with as you please, with two exceptions. First is my book collection, I wish for you to retain ownership of it all. Though I doubt you will have an issue with that. The second is that my cat Artemis be kept by you until her inevitable end. You need not worry about taking care of her as that will be part of Zinnia's duties. I have finally finished training Artemis (though I have decided to take the secret method to my grave), and she will be of some help to you as well. The details of all this have been left in my will, and with any luck it will all be settled quickly and easily. As always I ask for discretion in these matters. I have valued your friendship and wish you the best with what is left of your life.

Sincerely,

Lillian Abigail Wilmarth'

It was quite a bit to handle at first. So much was happening all at once and I'm not the best when it comes to stress. I found myself a bit overwhelmed and had to sit on the couch for a few minutes to gather my thoughts. Lillian had been one of my only close friends and I saw no reason to go against any of her wishes. They were all rather reasonable and would be rather helpful for me. At that time I wasn't doing the best financially and was trying to get a book put together. Having a pre-paid assistant could prove quite useful, as well as the extra money on top of that. What did catch my attention though was that part about the cat, and as I stared into Artemis's eyes I wondered if Lillian had really succeeded.

Not long after Lillian had begun to recede from society, her cat became one of her biggest obsessions. She talked often about how she had come across a form of hypnosis in an old book and was attempting to use it to train the cat to do a number of things. The most notable being to write. Though I will admit I found this premise quite ridiculous she seemed convinced that her work was possible and spent the remaining years of her life training the cat with this strange hypnotic technique. She never went into detail about her methods or her sources and I never witnessed any of the training take place. I did however witness some of the results.

It started out simple. The cat could do things like slowly pass me the sugar bowl, to being able to correctly place certain shaped objects in holes of corresponding shape. Eventually, Artemis was in fact able to write. At first it was simply typing on a keyboard or tablet, but then she was able to write on paper with the assistance of a special harness that allowed her to hold a pen. A frame suspended a fastener that held a pen right at ground level and had an area where she could insert her paw, allowing for articulation of the pen. It was an amazing accomplishment. I had been sworn to secrecy and that secrecy was now in writing as part of the will. I agreed to all of the conditions and signed so that I could claim my inheritance.

After moving had been settled, Zinnia and I then began the process of settling the remaining affairs such as what items to auction off, the remaining medical fees, and of course the funeral arrangements. It was a lovely ceremony and I must admit I cried several times, once in the middle of my eulogy. There were many tears from the people whose lives had been touched by Lillian. The strange thing is I don't think I ever saw Zinnia cry, she sat there with Artemis on her lap just petting her with a dower look on her face, but who am I to question someone's grieving process so I thought nothing of it at the time.

I was renting at the time and a fully paid for house was among my newly acquired assets, and said house contained a good amount of said assets. The house was also the current lodging of Zinnia so it was an easy choice to pack up what I cared about and move into Lillian's old house. After a few days of packing and moving I was comfortably living in my very own home, and given the decent size and live-in assistant it quickly began to feel like a mansion, one that had already began to feel like home given the amount of time I had spent there in the past years. After all was said and done I was finally able to sit down and start thinking of what to do moving forward, and the first thing of note was that beautiful yet strange cat.

Artemis already had her own room in the house, it was one of the smaller rooms on the upper floor and was well equip for her, even going so far as to install a cat door into the main door of the room so that Artemis could come and go as she pleased. Inside the room there was the normal assortment of cat things such as a bed, food, water, cat tower, scratching posts, and the sliding closet had been fitted with a cat door and housed the cat's bathroom. Having originally been a bedroom there was an attached bathroom and she must have liked to play with the toilet because I would sometimes here it flush when no one else was in there, though part of me wouldn't be surprised at this point if Lillian somehow trained her to use it. Along with the normal cat things there was a decent amount of writing and reading material. A computer sat on a desk with a special keyboard attached containing a large button for the cat to use easily, there was also a large variety of paper and pens along with that specially designed harness. She also had a decent library of books in her room, which though sounding strange makes sense when you think about it, she would have needed to learn to read before learning how to write.

Even stranger yet was the fact that Artemis became my editor as I began to work towards finishing and publishing my newest book. I was told she preferred her privacy so I almost never saw her actually working and rarely went into her room, I simply sent my work to the other computer via a closed network and after an average amount of time it would be sent back to me, edited quite competently. It was so weird at first but even if it was some sort of elaborate prank it couldn't deny that it was helping me out greatly. After a couple weeks of having Artemis as my editor she began to include not just normal edits like spelling, grammar, and word choice, but notes on my ideas and philosophy my work touched upon. As she worked on the book more it's as if she was understanding the book and adding to it to a point that it felt almost like I had someone helping me write it.

As Artemis became more and more involved in my work I found her becoming more and more involved in my life. At first I barely interacted with her but as things went on I found myself spending more and more time with her around, and quickly found myself talking to the cat often. When I talked to her it was hard not to feel like she was listening to what I was saying, and sometimes even seemed to respond with a hinted intelligence. She would often help me work through problems and eventually I started to view Artemis more as a friend.

Zinnia took care of all of the matters of the house, she cooked, cleaned, shopped, and of course took care of Artemis. At first she was a bit distant but this was to be expected given her recent loss, but she quickly warmed back up to me. She was a kind woman and I had no issues with her, though I often felt she cared more for the cat than me. She often talked fondly of Lillian and I could tell that she cared for her very much, so it would make sense that she would cherish what was left of her. She had always been pleasant and cheerful well in Lillian's employ and though she was always friendly to me I never really got to know her until she was working for me, but even then I felt like I wasn't quite scratching the surface of who she really was.

I'm not sure when it started but I began to have strange dreams where I would wake up as Artemis. At first I merely did cat things, scratching on the post or playing with the toys on the ground. It seemed so real, but usually didn't last long and only happened a few times a month, at least at first. As time went on I started to have the dream more often, and I started to explore more of the room. As I went through the book collection I mostly found average books that you would expect to have seen Lillian reading. One night though I found this strange journal that appeared to contain copied pages of some strange script that I couldn't read, I think it was Latin? It reminded me of what little I had seen of that strange Necronomicon that they have in the rare books library at the University. Lillian had taken me there one time when she was a Professor and I quickly browsed through a few of the more interesting looking books, that one included.

The last night that I had the dream ended up being very strange indeed, lasting the longest. It started normally, but I soon came across another journal, this time a lot of it seemed to be in some kind of cipher but there were a few normally written scraps of text. As I flipped through it a few passages stood out to me.

'After a while of pouring through the book with Zinnia's help I think we finally found something, I may not have to die after all, at least not really.'

'Early tests seem to be going well, I can take partial control for brief moments. Further testing is needed'

'I've been able to take control for longer, I hope I have time to finish my work.'

'This body is about to give out on me, but I am ready to make the final switch.'

I didn't know what any of this meant, but I didn't have time to ponder it much before a gust of night air blew a piece of paper off of the desk. I went over to look at it and it appeared to have been written in Lillian's Handwriting.

'Everything is going just as we planned, with Zinnia's help I'll be able to take over fully soon, and then we can be together again.'

It was at that moment that I heard what sounded like soft talking coming from elsewhere in the house, so I left the room and ventured into the hallway. The door to my room was cracked open and the light was on, I heard the muttering coming from there so decided to investigate. With my cat body I stealthily crept across the hallway and silently squeezed myself into the room. I saw what appeared to be me, that is my human self, sitting at my desk and quietly reading aloud from a book in front of me. Being a dream this situation wasn't that unheard of so I crept over to the desk. Using my cat skill and grace I easily jumped onto the desk next to the book and looked up at a visage of myself. Upon seeing me that dream image of me jumped with a fright, and then everything went black. I woke up at my desk, to find that Artemis was on the desk next to me. Though an odd coincidence I didn't see any reason to read into it further, the mind has a way of picking up things around you in your sleep and incorporating them into your dreams, though I couldn't shake the memory of what I had read in that diary, and on that note.

I had bigger things to worry about then strange texts in dreams so I pushed my thoughts of the dreams to the back of my mind. I figured I could just ignore them, but then the dreams started happening during the day. I found myself often nodding off and finding myself as the cat for brief times, the dreams seemed to only be lasting for a few seconds yet I would be asleep for several hours. Then everything changed. After these daytime dissociations started to get a little longer I found myself waking up in total black. It felt like the dream, I still felt like the cat, but I was enclosed in a small room barely big enough to fit me, with no cracks I could find or light to speak of. These dreams seemed to last for hours, though time was hard to tell when you're deprived of senses. The episodes happened more and more, first affecting my work and then affecting my life, until i was shutting myself off to all of the outside world. They were maddening, every time I had this fear that I would never wake up and this would be my life forever.

Zinnia would attempt to console me but somehow it felt insincere. It had to do with that cat I began to tell myself, I needed to figure it out. I waited for a day that Zinnia went out for groceries, and as soon as she left I went to examine Artemis's room. What I found there shocked me deeply. As I began to look through the books in the room I found exactly what I had seen well in my dreams, even that copied tome and strange ciphered diary containing the talk of some experiment. I dropped what I was doing as I heard a sound from the other side of the room and turned to see the cat in the corner, sitting on some sort of small wooden crate. The cat hissed at me and I ran from the room and into mine, where I have locked myself in. The only explanation is that the dreams I've been having aren't dreams at all, I've been spending time trapped in the body of that cat. It's taken me awhile but I think I've finally started to figure it out. I don't think Lillian trained that cat at all, but somehow found a way to put her mind inside of it. And now she wants me so she can keep on living. First she could only do it when I slept but now she's gotten powerful enough to do it well I'm conscious, and I fear she will soon be able to make it permanent. I feel her tugging at my brain, and I don't know how long I


End file.
